Francesca Healy (Student - Rhodes College) interviewing Dwight Fryer (Entrepreneur, Farmer and Independent Researcher), Debra Lockard (Farmer -Lockard Produce) and Brenda Williams (Healthy Foods Coordinator - Communities Unlimited)
Transcript
This podcast is part of the Rhodes College Just Food Series, which addresses food inequality through discussions of production, access, distribution and consumption in Memphis and beyond. In this semester long project, students and community members have come together to promote empowerment through awareness and equity.
I’m Francesca Healy, and I’ll be hosting this episode: “Legacies of the Land.”
What is Just Food? Well, it depends on who you ask, but for us, it’s about helping tell the stories of individuals and organizations that have joined the fight for a more accessible, equitable, and inclusive food system. The history of food in the United States is a complicated one, and recently our nation’s consciousness has begun to pay closer attention to the sourcing and sustainability of our foods. As this movement grows, are the stories of those that produce our food, distribute it, and consume it being heard and responded to? This podcast series is aimed at illuminating the Food Justice movement in the Memphis area, exploring some of the organizations that are involved in the fight for a more accessible and inclusive food system and observing what their impact looks like. But, in order to understand why these organizations are important, we must understand what the food system looks like for those involved.
Today, many Americans are familiar with terms that describe troubling aspects of the food system, like “food deserts” and “food insecurity.” Much of this awareness is the result of a growing Food Justice Movement that began in the middle of the 1990s. Since then, a broad array of activists and organizers across the country have recognized the injustice of the contemporary agrifood system, and have advocated for radical change. The movement has pulled from the ideology of other social justice movements like civil rights, and its aim has been to address food inequalities that disproportionately affect groups on the basis of race and socioeconomic status. (Agyemen and McEntee 212). A publication from the Center for Social Inclusion in 2014 presented some staggering statistics that paint a picture of how our food system fails too many of us. Nearly 16 million children in the US experience food insecurity, while 1 in 6 Americans work somewhere in the food system and women, African Americans, and Latinos often suffer from low wages and poor working conditions (Giancatarino and Noor 4).
Of those individuals working in the food system in 2012, 3.2 million were farmers (2012 Census of Agriculture Fact Sheets). Farmers and growers are critically important to the food system, but their opportunities are often overshadowed by the growing consolidation of major corporations. Who wins and who loses in agriculture is heavily influenced by federal policy, a mechanism that has systematically put family farmers and farmers of color at the losing end (Giancatarino and Noor 13). The 40% of our nation’s farmers that are represented by minorities have faced a long history of discrimination and exclusion, none more so than black agriculturalists in the South. In 2012, 90% of the 50,000 African American farmers lived in the twelve Southernmost states.
In the 1800s, Memphis was the center of trade for the South’s cotton production, and today it is still one of the agricultural hubs of the MidSouth. This extensive relationship with food cultivation and trade has inspired us to explore how farmers and growers in Memphis relate to the long and complex agricultural history of the region, while also hearing about the struggles and joys of those that help bring food to our tables.
I met Dwight Fryer a few months back on a trip to Ames plantation, a land trust built around 12,000 acres from previous plantations that was amassed by Hobart Ames in the early 1900s. This land is now used as a center for education and research, which Dwight has become involved in. Dwight is a writer, accountant, pastor, and avid explorer of his relationship to the land where his family has been for generations.
Dwight: My mother grew up on Ames plantation. I grew up nearby, four miles away in the town of Grand Junction. Back in the day when Hobart Ames a Julia Colony Ames began buying up their twenty seven thousand acres of land that came from 28 different plan plantation landscapes out there. Grand Junction was a kind of a mini railroad transportation hub, and it was the intersection of two north south railroads. So that's kind of where it all came from. But for me, every Sunday, minimally, every two every weeks we went to Ames Plantation to visit my grandmother and my aunts and uncles that still lived there. My last relative moved off the plantation in 1968 when I was ten, So I've kinda always been drawn to the place and its history that's entangled with my family's history of being enslaved on several of those 28 plantations that Hobart and Julia Ames bought.
Dwight is passionate about uncovering the untold histories of his ancestors, and seeks to reveal the truth about what life was life for them.
Dwight: Well, I've kind of at a lot of times I've been able to point out different things to him as a descendant of enslaved African Americans, because so often when history is as dark as this history is, we don't want to speak the truth. We don't want to talk about the oppressive and violent nature of the plantation landscape. We talk about Me Too today. And that's a wonderful thing that we do discuss it, but we don't discuss Me Too, on the plantation landscape and since then, during Jim Crow and even up to the day and the civil rights movement of how if you've got an educated, powerful person who happens to be female or male today, and the rule of law is not protected from sexual harassment and different types of things, think of what was happening to slave women and men.
Dwight’s family has a long oral tradition, passed down by members of his family, that has allowed him to make connections to the land where his family lived and worked.
Dwight: There was some land that’s now a part of the plantation that had been owned by a part of my family and the oral history always said that, And I'd never checked the property records. But he had all the property maps from the late 1880s forward. And when I told him the surname was Pugh, He got really excited and Ran over to his files and Said “let me show you something, I've been trying to figure this out for years.” And he came back with this map and it had this block of land that I have pointed out when we were riding around what day - This was owned by my relatives and his name was Ephraim Pugh. And he pulls out a map that has all of the people that Hobart Ames had acquired land from and it had their names on their block of land. And it had “E. Pugh” on that block of land. So, again, our oral history has been very strong because we had this woman that lived to 1920 and told those stories to my mother's generation. And they told them to people of my generation. And then I've been able to verify. And so what it gives me, it gives me a certain sense of strength to understand how strong these people were that I descended from. How they have to be that strong to survive this.
As a kid, Dwight lived in Grand Junction, just a few miles from the plantation and continued to help his family make an income from farming:
Dwight: Well, it was one of the luxuries that I had. And it was a small luxury, But it was still significant. My father grew up a sharecropper down in the town of Grand Junction, not on Ames Plantation, and he went to the military in 1942, late ‘42 early ‘43 was when he enlisted, a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And I asked him one time, we were watching the Battle of the Bulge, and he was telling me what it was like to be in that horrific battle, he fought in that battle in Europe, in Belgium. And I asked him, "Dad, How could you volunteer for that? Weren't you afraid that you were going to get killed in a war like this? Because by the time they went, they knew how horrible the war was, there was nothing glamorous about it. He said, “You know, I had to think about getting killed. But, what I really dreaded, was dying walking behind that mule on that 10 acres of scrub poor clay land on the south side of Grand Junction that my daddy and I sharecropped and we never made any money. And I did not want to live my life like that. And I want to have my own home.” So he, when he went to war he sent home money, and his father bought an acre of land and bought up most of the lumber to build a small four room house and my seven siblings and I grew up in that house. So we lived in a house that we didn't rent from someone who could oppress us. It was my mom and dad's home. It was paid for. It didn't have a mortgage. But growing up on that one acre of land, gave me a lot of autonomy that a lot of my peers in the African American community didn't have. Now, when I went to pick cotton for somebody, usually it was owned by another white person. Occasionally there were few black people that owned some land, and I picked cotton for them, I picked watermelon, picked strawberries, I picked squash, picked okra. You better have good gloves and long sleeves when you pick okra. I’m old enough to where I grew up picking cotton OK.
So as I'm growing up in the 60s and maturing in the 70s, and I got to the 70s, We stopped picking cotton because the two wheel cotton picker and the four wheel cotton picker late had come on. But when I was a young boy, we picked cotton, we caught the cotton truck. So I knew all about “Yeah we grow cotton.” And I knew that people went to the feild and you got paid a half cent a barrel. And most days you might make enough to buy your lunch and have a little left over. If you were really a strong picker you maybe made a dollar or two. Because, you know, if you pick 200 barrels of cotton that's a dollar. And I grew up watching that. I know what it's like to watch a man walk behind a mule, plowing a row, one row at a time.
Today, Dwight says not enough people recognize the benefit of participating in agriculture:
Dwight: That’s one of the problems I think that a lot of families that have moved to the city do, we don't do agriculture anymore. We don't grow one garden now. I don’t even grow a tomato anymore. And in addition to, you know, that's not a problem for me getting fresh produce, because I'm economically blessed. But if you're in urban areas and there's no grocery store nearby, where you can go buy tomatoes or some turnip greens or whatever that’s green and healthy for you. I can do that, but I also think that there's something spiritual about planting a seed in soil that you have tilled, And we just don't do it anymore.
Debra Lockard agrees that she’s seen people’s interest in farming decreasing, to the point that she has difficulty finding labor to help her manage her 30 acre farm. Debra is a woman of many talents, and the owner of Lockard’s Produce:
Debra: I am a retiree from the legacy Shelby County Schools. I retired as a principal in 2014 to start, to fulfill my dream of being a farmer. And I've been in education for thirty six years.
Debra is also the president of a co-op organization called Tri Delta Agricultural Co-op, where her and 12 other primarily African-American small-farmers get together to coordinate their growing and manage the difficulties of owning and running small farms:
Debra: We have our board of directors that we set up that way and then we meet monthly and we sit down and we support one another. We establish our growth-cropping plan and what each person is going to grow, what markets are available. We have a person in charge of sales and marketing and that person goes out and makes sure that We service the community, and already we have community events at Abundant Earth facility hear in Memphis, and we also, I can't leave out Communities Unlimited, and so they can help us also. But the way that we support one another, one way that we just started it, we're going to go around with each other's farms and help one another because labor, finding labor, is our biggest problem right now. That the big downside. So we decided that we would help one another. We would spend time at each farm. And once, you know, I need help planting because most of us, we grow our own plants and we have to find people to help us, you know, put those in the ground.
Debra says that this has not always been the case, especially in her experience on her family’s farm, the same land where she now works.
Debra: No, because we were the grandkids, you know the grandkids helped during the summertimes. And my granddad had 6 children OK. And my mother, her parents also had 6 children. So they helped. You know, that was their sustainability Right there. You know, bringing food to the house and helping feed the community. But now new farmers, our generation, we didn't have 6 kids. OK. I have one child.
Like Dwight, Debra was introduced to agriculture and her family’s legacy on their land early on. That connection is one of the major reasons that Debra was inspired to leave her job and begin her career as a farmer:
Debra: I grew up hear in Memphis but we always traveled back up to the farm in Glimp, Tennessee during the summertime, and during the regular school year also, just to harvest. We would spend our summers, not the entire summer, we would spend sometimes in the summer with our grandparents up on the farm. And so and I was the one that fell in love with milking cows, and hogs and herding up the cattle that we had, I’m going to say livestock because we had a whole lot. So we would herd up the livestock, feed the chickens, and make sure that we get up on time. I just loved it. So that's how I grew up. And my uncle is still alive now. He's the only one that’s alive and still lives on the family farm. And my brother and I have acquired the rest of the land that kind of circled around us. There's about a total, he owns a total of 165 acres and I think i own around 30 acres. And we have just about purchased the rest that we had that, that we owned in the very beginning. And so it's been a legacy that we were going to always farm. And On my mom's side they farmed in Ripley and we still have that land also, and that's one of my new 2020 goals is to start that garden back up.
Debra’s grandfather bought that land at least 90 years ago, and now Debra is trying to get her son involved, because she realizes the importance of keeping the land in the family
Debra: That was one rule that I remember my grandparents said; "Don't ever sell this land, it is our Lockard legacy, enduring legacy. You don't sell land, you buy land." And that's what I’ve instilled into my son.
Even with the extensive legacy of Debra’s family and the help of her uncle and brother, she has also had to make major adjustments to keep up:
Debra: So and the way I build that community support is that I open the farm up and I have presentations and have people come up to see where their food actually comes from. And I participate in the farmer's markets every week. Almost every week, some weeks I can’t. But all year long I am at Cooper Young farmer's market because they’re open year round, and then in the summer months I go to South Memphis farmer's market, Germantown Farmer's Market, and I've been in these area nursing homes, not nursing homes but independent living facilities. And to help me better manage what I’m trying to do, I'm into different programs in the farm programs that I'm into. And especially the outreach program, the UT extension program in Ripley, Tennessee. They have been just wonderful with helping me this year. They always have, but they have wide power growing, and they say "well you need to do this" And actually, Tennessee State University has partnered with me, and I'm becoming more of a demonstration farm and trying to move towards agro-tourism. I'm trying to get my farm ready now. My next workshop is going to be in March of 2020.
Debra is also diligently applying for grants, researching assistance programs, and connecting with people all over the Memphis food scene.
Debra: There are more opportunities that I see that other farmers of different races have the opportunity to go into That I never knew about, and it’s kind of hard to break into that field, because farming used to be an all male field. Well, I won't say, all male. It used to be mostly male. And so now that females have come along and African Americans are coming along, there is still some opposition that I hit. But I don't look at it as a hinderance. I say "well, I've got to break this barrier" and it all depends, when you have a diverse group of people working on your team at the top, then it opens the door for other ethnicities to come in. Because things have just totally changed for me this year. I just thank God that I had the opportunity to Get involved with all the programs and to learn all the different programs that were available to me. but I never stop progress and going to workshops and networks, you know to network and to learn more.
As she has begun to overcome these challenges and grow her business, Debra has also started considering the needs of her community to influence her work:
Debra: Because there are still so many food deserts here in Memphis and I'm trying to work in the South Memphis market, my two main markets are Cooper Young and South Memphis. But it’s because I’ve been with Cooper Young and South Memphis market for 5 years. And my goal with the South Memphis market, I also go to church in the area, is to, we got vacant land around the church and I'm trying to show where it would be so profitable if we start a garden and help the people in their community to come out and, you know, garden, and show a sustainable way of life. You can always have food. You know healthy food, you don't have to go to some convenient store and just buy junk. You can have fresh produce right here. So if we can get to establish a group of volunteers just To understand how you can invite community members in, and they can work it. And then they learn the trade of it And they actually come in and they shop in the same garden because they're working there. And then they get a chance to take food back out and they actually pay a slight membership fee, which wouldn't be much. And so, because one of the gardens here is already set up like that, I think it’s the veterans garden over there on Ball road.
Her desire to help support her community is a family value, she says when talking about her what her family used to do with the produce they grew:
Debra: You know what they did with their tomatoes, They shared it with the community members. You know it, so that's how they just helped everyone stay fed. I could say that I come from a very compassionate family, that's one of our legacies is to just give back and that’s why I linked up with some of the independent living centers, because I wanted to give back. You know, because they are so happy when they see greens.
Debra’s work has brought her into contact with organizations focusing on different aspects of Food Justice all over Memphis, especially the organizations that are built to support small and minority farmers like 275 Food Project and Communities Unlimited. I sat down with Brenda Williams who works for a USDA funded organization called Food LINC, and whose office is decorated in signs saying things like, “If you’ve eaten today, thank a farmer.”
Brenda: My name is Brenda Williams and I am the healthy foods coordinator with Communities Unlimited. I am the value chain coordinator for the mid-South Food LINC. And the mid-South Food LINC is a healthy food initiative here in Memphis. And our goal, one of our goals is to increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables here in the midsouth Delta region.
One of Food LINCs main modes of action is connecting growers with vendors all over the MidSouth.
Brenda: So mainly our growers are small scale African-American growers, and that's just because that's our mission here in reference to our work, we want to work for small scale, underserved growers. And so once I connected to one grower, he would tell other growers and before you know it I would have a meeting and It would be 10 or 15 growers there. And so that's how we were able to connect to about currently right now, it's about 52 growers that we're working with. Most of the growers that we work with are family farms, they’re farms that have been in their family for a number of generations. So one of our goals is to improve the farm capacity and another goal is to increase access. So one of the things that we did this past summer, we worked with Shelby County Schools and it was a pilot project where we connected about three local growers, small scale growers from family farms to the Shelby County Schools. So they have a summer program, So we provided fresh produce to their summer program and it was about eleven schools. So it was an opportunity for schools that are in Memphis. Most of the schools were located, I think most of them were located in food deserts or underserved populations. So someone in that area was able to get access to fresh berries from a local grower. That's an opportunity for the grower to sell his produce to a school. So that's another market for him. And so our goal is to improve access as well as improve the farm capacity.
Brenda describes herself as an advocate, working on behalf of small-scale growers like Debra. She has seen what the landscape looks like and has seen many of the same barriers that Debra has experienced. She recognizes the importance of helping farmers maintain their legacy:
Brenda: With our growers, whether you’re a third a fifth generation grower, This is what you've always done. This has been in your family history and this is what you enjoy doing.
For individuals like Dwight, who is exploring his connections to the land and the agricultural history of the MidSouth, and Debra who is actively maintaining her family’s land and legacy, it is evident that the agricultural history of the region is still very much present in their lives. While many small farmers struggle to maintain their land and meet their needs, organizations like Brenda’s are helping to support these legacies and make farming more sustainable for those individuals. One thing that Debra says you can do to help…
Debra: Purchase our produce.
Debra sells her produce at Cooper Young farmer’s market and the South Memphis farmer’s market year round. As local and sustainable produce becomes more popular, it is important to understand what the landscape looks like for those who grow our food, and in Memphis, what better way to support the legacy of small farmers than by tasting their hard work.